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London Philharmonic Orchestra

"Gutted": Tim Walker chief executive of the London Philharmonic Orchestra

Yesterday, as Tim Walker, chief executive of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, attended to the fine details for last night's performance of the LPO at the Royal Albert Hall, he could be excused for letting his mind drift to the dramatic events soon to unfold across town.

For next month in Southwark Crown Court, Walker's most trusted aide, Cameron Poole, the former financial director of the LPO, will face a different sort of music: he'll be sentenced for defrauding his employer out of £666,000.

Walker has decided not to go to hear Judge Deborah Taylor hand down what she has said is likely to be a prison sentence, and which Walker estimates "could be up to five years". For Poole, a committed Christian who paradoxically embarked upon a part-time masters in ethics at King's College London while cooking the books at the LPO, it is the end of the line: he has lost his job, his house, his wife, and, in all probability, his freedom.

But the case also provokes complex emotions in Walker, at once desperate to "draw a line" under the discordant scandal which happened on his watch and for which he offered his resignation, yet also keen to explain how he has recovered "every last penny" of the money stolen from the publicly funded LPO.

"It was me who discovered the fraud last October," begins Walker, speaking in his first interview since Poole's criminal trial ended last month. "Cameron worked for me for five years. He was very personable with bright blue eyes, a charming family man with three young children. I liked him, we all liked him, and I trusted him absolutely." He shakes his head. "That's what made the betrayal so gutting."

Both Walker, 55, a music graduate from the University of Tasmania, and Poole, 36, are Australian, and some in the arts world wonder whether this kinship contributed to his misjudgment and gullibility. It is a charge that Walker denies.

"The decision to hire him in 2004 was taken by myself and three other board members on the basis that he was the accountant with the best credentials for the job," he says, showing me into his modest office on the Albert Embankment adjacent to the MI6 building. "He had worked for [the global management consulting company] Accenture, he presented well, and we were impressed by his enthusiasm and energy. And until he left us for another job in August 2009, I thought he was doing an exemplary piece of work."

The fiddle only came to light a few weeks after Poole left when Walker noticed that the accounts tabled to the board "jumped out" at him "with glaring overstatements".

"I assumed they were honest mistakes, but when I asked our accounts clerk to investigate, we discovered systematic fraud going back four years. He'd been hiding the transactions in a dormant account, making bank transfers to himself and forging the crucial second signature required on cheques."

Poole, it turned out, had siphoned off about £160,000 a year to pay for flights, clothing, art and jewellery and to renovate the four-bedroom house that he and his wife, Suzanne, 32, then a Tory councillor in Lambeth, had bought as a burnt-out shell in Herne Hill, south London. The biggest single forged cheque for £85,000 was made out to his builder, but, in all, more than £360,000 of LPO money had been plundered to pay for his renovation.

Worse news was to follow: the deception had led Walker to believe that the LPO had more money in the coffers than was the case, and he'd put on extra performances that resulted in a depletion of reserves and additional "consequential losses" of £1.6 million.

"When we discovered the extent of it, I felt kicked in the stomach," he says. He tails off, struggling to articulate his emotions. Walker, who lives in an apartment near the Royal Festival Hall with his long-term partner, is an intensely private man unused to occupying the public spotlight.

A question also arose as to why Walker, who is paid just shy of £140,000 and is also the LPO's artistic director, had not spotted the "glaring overstatements" before.

"Initially I blamed myself," he admits. "We're only a £10 million organisation and so to lose £2.3 million of your reserves is a big chunk. I called the chairman of the board to say that if he wanted me to resign, I'd go, but he insisted it was in the interests of the LPO that I stay. From that moment on, I put sentiment to one side and focused on getting our money back. All of it."

It helped that Poole had been speedily arrested and had admitted his guilt, and at the civil case in the High Court earlier this year, Walker began the process of clawing back the swindled cash. He obtained a freezing order on Poole's £900,000 house — since sold — to be divided up between the mortgagor, Poole's estranged wife (she is not implicated) and the LPO.

He also went after HSBC and got "full restitution of £481,000" for the forged cheques, "plus £35,000 in lost interest". And he sought to recover £1.3 million in an ambitious negligence claim against auditors Deloittes. "I can't say what we got because the settlement is confidential, but it was a substantial sum," he says.

"Getting the stolen money back and making significant inroads into the consequential losses with no knock-on financial impact on the orchestra is probably the best outcome I could have hoped for."

There was also relief that no benefactors pulled the plug: "In fact we increased donations because of the fraud by £150,000." Indeed, one of the LPO's biggest funders, Arts Council England — which gives the LPO £2.1 million annually — told the Standard it views the incident as "a one-off case by rogue elements against which it can be difficult to legislate".

But what about the damage to the LPO's (and Walker's) reputation? Granted, it was back in the Eighties, well before Walker's tenure began in 2003, that the LPO suffered its last internal fraud — though that case was skilfully kept out of the papers. Still, were there not clues that Poole, who earned a modest £60,000 a year, was living above his station?

"Not really," reflects Walker. "He rode a bicycle to work and although he didn't have frayed collars like his predecessor" — he permits himself the semblance of a smile for the first time — "he wore the same suit almost every day. And because we never socialised out of work — the LPO perform 175 nights a year and on other nights I go and listen to other orchestras — I had no idea what his house looked like or what works were under way."

Walker was not the only one duped by Poole. For four years Poole had served as treasurer to the Gipsy Hill Church in Crystal Palace, where the vicar Andrew Rumsey knew him well.

"Cameron was a pillar of our community," Rev Rumsey told the Standard. "He was good-natured, well respected, a dedicated dad, and he gave his time, unpaid, to the community. He was the last person I'd suspect of having his hands in the till."

Mr Rumsey has since satisfied himself that Poole did not pilfer from the church's £120,000-a-year budget, but despite having "occasional contact" with him since, is no closer to gleaning why he did it. "I've spoken to him and he says he profoundly regrets the hurt his actions have caused to his family and his employer. Personally, I cannot work it out. We were deeply shocked by the whole affair. None of us understands why he's done it. Maybe he doesn't fully understand it himself."

Another who knew him, Prof Peter Byrne, a lecturer at King's College where Cameron was taking a masters in ethics and philosophy of religion, told the Standard: "Cameron only took the first year of a two-year, part-time MA. He did not enrol for the second year. With what we know now, that decision is perfectly explicable; at the time, we assumed it was work or family commitments that prevented him coming back."

Unlike Reverend Rumsey, Walker has had no contact with Poole, nor received an apology. He has also stayed well away, he says, from the civil and criminal hearings, giving his evidence by deposition and resisting the urge to confront Poole and ask him: "Why?"

"You reach a point where it's taken a year of your life to unravel and you just want to draw a line under the whole sorry episode and move on," says Walker. "I have no views on how long he should serve. I am content to leave that to the judge."

You get the sense that Walker will be intensely relieved to get back to his day job — deciding the repertoire and managing the giant egos of the brilliant conductors and soloists who grace his orchestra. Yehudi Menuhin, Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pré have all performed with the LPO.

"The moment I take my seat and the music begins, I'm transported into a different world and all of this business is forgotten," says Walker. "Even ifI'm listening to the same performance for the 10th time, I'm feeling the audience reaction, picking out individual instruments and musicians, working, working."

In this, just the second week of the LPO's new London season, Walker will be seeking a fresh start. Rave reviews would be good. But mostly, you sense, he will be keen to make sure that this year, unlike last, the LPO make headlines for all the right reasons.